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Why Men Look Angry and Women Look Happy

People are quicker to
see anger on men's faces and happiness on women's. Is this research
finding a simple case of gender
stereotyping, or something more deeply rooted? When I was conducting research
on smiling my clients assumed that women always smiled more than men.
Women do smile more than men, when they are in public. We like our women to
smile that makes all of us men and women feel safe. There are more interesting
insights in the following article by Beth Azar.

By Beth Azar

April 2007, Vol 38, No. 4

Print version: page 18

It might not be surprising that
people find it easier to see men as angry and women as happy. Women do tend to
be the nurturers and men--well--men do commit 80 to 90 percent of all violent
crimes. More surprising, perhaps, is new research suggesting that the
connection between men and anger and women and happiness goes deeper than these
simple social stereotypes, regardless of how valid they are.

Our brains automatically link anger
to men and happiness to women, even without the influence of gender
stereotypes, indicate the findings of a series of experiments conducted by
cognitive psychologist D. Vaughn Becker, PhD, of Arizona State University at
the Polytechnic Campus, with colleagues Douglas T. Kenrick, PhD, Steven L.
Neuberg, PhD, K.C. Blackwell and Dylan Smith, PhD. They even turned it around
to show that people are more likely to think a face is masculine if it's making
an angry expression and feminine if its expression is happy. In fact, their
research, published in February's Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology (Vol. 92, No. 2, pages 179-190), suggests that the cognitive
processes that distinguish male and female may be co-mingled with those that
distinguish anger from happiness, thereby leading to this perceptual bias.

Becker proposes that this bias may
stem from our evolutionary past, when an angry man would have been one of the
most dangerous characters around, and a nurturing, happy female might have been
just the person to protect you from harm. Evolutionary psychologist Leda
Cosmides, PhD, agrees.

"If it's more costly to make a
mistake of not recognizing an angry man, you would expect the [perceptual]
threshold to be set lower than for recognizing an angry female," says
Cosmides, of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

More than a stereotype

Becker first noticed that people
find it easier to detect anger on men and happiness on women a couple years ago
while working on his dissertation at Arizona State. He was testing whether
viewing an angry or happy expression "primes" people to more quickly
identify a subsequent angry or happy expression. Becker confirmed his initial
hypothesis, but when he ran an additional analysis to test whether the gender
of the person making the facial expression affected his results, he found that
gender was, by far, the biggest predictor of how quickly and accurately people
identified facial expressions.

Becker couldn't find any mention of
this gender effect in the literature. So he set out to confirm that people more
quickly link men to anger and women to happiness and figure out why that might
be.

In the first of a series of studies,
38 undergraduate participants viewed pictures of faces displaying prototypical
angry and happy expressions. They pressed "A" or "H" on a
computer keyboard to indicate whether the expression was angry or happy, and
the researchers recorded their reaction times. As expected, participants were
quicker to label male faces "angry" and female faces
"happy."

The researchers then used a version
of the "Implicit Association Test" to uncover unconscious biases that
study participants may have linking men to anger and women to happiness. The
well-documented test allows researchers to examine the strength of connections
between categories, which lead to unconscious stereotypes. Becker tested
whether study participants unconsciously linked male names with angry words and
female names with happy words. Most did.

However, 13 students showed the
opposite association (male-happy, female-angry), implying that their
unconscious gender stereotypes run counter to those of the general public. It
was an ideal opportunity to determine whether gender stereotypes are at the heart
of the emotion/gender bias. They weren't: Just like the main group of
participants, this subgroup more quickly and accurately categorized male faces
as angry and female faces as happy.

"While gender stereotypes
clearly influence perception, the implicit association test results made us
think the effect is not solely a function of stereotypes," says Becker.

Overlapping signals

Since gender stereotypes don't seem
to be the culprit, Becker looked toward more deeply rooted causes.

For example, perhaps we see more men
with angry faces--on television, in movies--than we see women with angry faces,
so our brains are well practiced at recognizing an angry expression on a man.
To investigate this possibility, one of the co-authors, Arizona State
University graduate student K.C. Blackwell, suggested they flip the experiment
around. Instead of asking people to identify facial expressions while the
experimenters manipulated gender, they asked them to identify whether a face
was male or female while manipulating facial expressions.

"While you can argue that the
majority of angry faces we see are male, it's tough to argue that the majority
of male faces we see are angry," says Becker. So, if the relationship
between emotional expression and gender is simply a matter of how frequently we
see anger on men and happiness on women, the effect should disappear when
researchers flip around the question. What they found, on the contrary, was
that people were faster to identify angry faces as male and happy faces as
female.

To follow-up on this finding, they
conducted another study in which they used computer graphics software to
control not only the intensity of facial expressions, but also the masculinity
and femininity of the facial features, creating faces that were just slightly
masculine or feminine. As predicted, people were more likely to see the more
masculine faces as angrier, even when they had slightly happier expressions
than the more feminine faces.

These findings suggest that the
brain begins to associate emotions and gender very early in the cognitive
process, says Becker. One possible explanation is that the brain has an
"angry male detection module" enabling fast and accurate detection of
what would have been one of the most dangerous entities in our evolutionary past.
But Becker thinks there's a more parsimonious explanation.

"I'm more inclined to think
that we've got a situation where the signals for facial expressions and those
for masculinity and femininity have merged over time," he says.

In particular, features of
masculinity --such as a heavy brow and angular face--somewhat overlap with the
anger expression, and those of femininity--roundness and soft features--overlap
with the happiness expression.

To test this hypothesis, Becker and
his colleagues used computer animation software to individually manipulate
masculine and feminine facial features of expressively neutral faces. As
predicted, a heavier brow caused participants to see faces as both more
masculine and more angry, implying that the mental processes for determining
masculinity and anger may be intertwined.

"These results make a lot of
sense," says University of Pittsburgh behavioral anthropologist and facial
expression researcher Karen Schmidt, PhD. "Faces have always had gender,
so if we're always activating gender and affect at the same time then the
processing is likely highly coordinated."

The paper raises new and interesting
questions about gender, says UCSB postdoctoral student Aaron Sell, PhD, who
studies the evolution of gender. "Specifically," he says, "why
do male and female faces differ, and what is the nature of emotion
detection?"

The data appear to suggest that the
anger expression has evolved to make a face seem more masculine, says Sell.
Even female faces may communicate anger more effectively the more masculine
they appear, says Becker. Future studies will have to tackle questions about
the intentions expressed by the angry face and why looking more male would be
an evolutionary advantage in communicating these intentions.

"I see this article as opening
the book on a new research topic more than having the final say on the
issue," says Sell.